From an abnormal situation the boy thus advanced to an absurd one. The Verlaines were poor, and the poet and his seventeen-year-old wife were living with the wife’s parents in order to save money. They may have been prepared for the coming of a young man, even a very young man, but this gawky, queer, unmanageable seventeen-year-old boy...! It is clear that he soon came to be regarded as an inconvenient intruder by the practical ladies of the poet’s family.
In spite of his difficulties, many of his own making, the year 1871-’72 was Rimbaud’s great year. He perfected his theory that the maker of poetry should be a seer, and practise “the long, immense, and reasoned disordering of the senses,” and give to the world “the supreme exaltation arrived at through things unheard of and unnameable.” The Parisian literary world, not knowing what to make of art so disorderly and personal, Rimbaud took his familiar refuge in rudeness. A consciousness of his genius strengthened the wings of his pride. In odds and ends of time, in order to gain a little money, he hawked key rings under the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli. Paris beginning to bore him, he actually returned for a little time to Charleville.
While Rimbaud was at Charleville, Verlaine, beset by family troubles, wrote to him begging him to join him in a vagabond tour. Rimbaud, whose consciousness was melting in the flame of hallucinations and poetic ecstasies, accepted at once, and in July, 1872, the two poets set off together. “I sought the sea, as if it were to cleanse me from a stain,” wrote Rimbaud. A curious pair and a curious pilgrimage. One has a glimpse of mean lodgings, gutters, roadsides, empty pockets, visions, exaltations, absinthe, dirt and debt. From Belgium, they went to England, where each gathered a few pence teaching French. Returning to Brussels in July, 1873, Verlaine, while in some kind of mental state best studied by psychopathologists, shot his fellow poet in the wrist with a pistol, and was promptly imprisoned by the Belgian authorities. The wound was not serious.
Mme. Rimbaud owned a kind of farm and country house at Roche, and later in the same month of July she suddenly saw Arthur coming towards the gate with his arm in a sling. Now comes a problem to be answered by those who study genius; Rimbaud ceased writing poetry forever. The verse which was to stir France and mould a world style was thus the work of a boy in his eighteenth year. What had taken place? Had his capricious genius flown away to another bough? Had his poetry of visions and hallucinations begun to uncover mysteries beyond the power of the human spirit to endure? Had some intense satisfaction he had known in the composition of poetry begun to fade?
Such is the tale of Arthur Rimbaud’s bizarre career as a poet. Is it a wonder that the younger generation wished to know what had become of the man?
II
The poet having ceased to write poetry, a vast part of the house of the brain now lay dark and tenantless, its emptiness accentuated by a memory of the lost spirit whose poetic vitality had once filled the mansion. A wildness of wandering now seized the boy; he was trying to fill the haunted, echoing rooms as best he could, and like the king in the parable, he sought his guests on the roads. He goes to Stuttgart to study German; he crosses the St. Gothard pass on foot and visits Italy; he pays his lodging with casual labor as he goes. And always searching, searching, searching with growing exasperation in his tone.
Then Charleville, and a winter picking up Arabian and Russian,—he is trying to house the intellect in a room once inhabited by something of the very essence of the spirit,—then a journey through Belgium and Holland, and a meeting with a Dutch recruiting sergeant who persuaded him to join the Dutch colonial army. On May 19th, 1876, he signs an engagement for six years, receives 600 francs as a gratuity, sails for Java, disembarks at Batavia, serves for three weeks, deserts, and returns to Europe on an English ship.
Returning to Charleville, he remained there but a short time, and then hurried to Cologne. A strange new guest had arrived unsought in his mind’s house, the money-saving instinct, for it is deeper than reason, of the provident French mind. Its first manifestation was not exactly a sympathetic one; in fact, the poet’s part in it has a sniff of the bounder, Latin style. Envying the easy commissions of the sergeant who had enlisted him, this deserter so loudly sang the praises of the Dutch Colonial army that he induced a dozen young Germans to accompany him to Holland and enlist. Rimbaud then pocketed the enlistment commission, and escaped to Hamburg.
At Hamburg a circus is in need of an interpreter, and the sometime poet of hallucinations is given the post. With the circus he goes to Copenhagen, and then flies from it to Stockholm.